Single-copy sales or subscription revenues: What’s the best course of action for your newspaper? No brainer, I hear you say. We have to be subscription-based, or we would die.

Perhaps you might if you instantly abandoned subscription tomorrow, but for the majority of the world’s newspaper readers, the favored approach is to find a place where they can hand over their hard-earned cash to buy that day’s edition.

It says something about the power of ink on paper that each day more than 500 million people worldwide buy a newspaper and share it with friends and family.

But which newspaper enjoys the greatest loyalty? The one with 50,000 subscribers? Or the one with 50,000 single-copy sales?

In the case of the subscribed paper, it is a fair bet that a minority of subscribers are true loyalists. The remainder are readers who continually renew their subscriptions or short-term subscribers who were encouraged to sign on because of a discount or incentive.

Different issues

The single-copy newspaper faces a different set of issues. The 50,000 copies it sells are probably accounted for by 100,000 or 150,000 buyers, who purchase the paper two or three times every week without fail.

My observation, having advised newspapers on four continents in the last year on circulation development, is that those that rely on subscriptions tend to be weak at single-copy sale, while those who excel in single-copy sales need to be imbued with the detail required for subscription development.

What is certainly the case is that both genres would benefit from an injection of the others’ experience. And few newspapers are good at exploiting the relationship between the two.

As circulation maintenance becomes more challenging, publishers must resort to a loyalty ladder model across a portfolio of products if they are to retain their future audiences.

The first goal, of course, is to encourage people to read newspapers. Today, in Europe, nearly twice as many 13-to-24-year-olds read a free daily than a paid-for daily. That’s not because the freebies have stolen readership; rather they attracted a new sector of readers by being in the right place at the right time.

Good habit

As these new readers grow older and stop traveling on public transport - which is the frees’ primary route to market - they will have been infected with the newspaper habit.

That’s where paid-for dailies can jump in by offering free sampling. This not only encourages readership, but taps a base of readership that appeals to advertisers. This concept is going to be increasingly prevalent in the future.

At the other extreme, newspapers must become far better at knowing and retargeting their most loyal customers.

Many subscription-based newspapers ignore the opportunities available to increase the reader’s interest and thus create incremental revenue streams.

Some newspapers charge subscribers up to 50 percent more than the annualized single-copy cost by adding offers and products into the subscription. Bottom line? The newspaper reaps revenues three times higher than a discount-based subscription newspaper might be generating in other markets.

Increasingly, such packaging will spread across digital and mobile services as well.

Publishers also have to understand the needs and behavior patterns that define the spectrum of their readers’ allegiance.

Tracking these relationships reveals a number of interesting factors:

*The first is that subscribers are not necessarily loyal. While daily “purchase” is guaranteed, daily readership is not. Readership research reveals that reader-per-copy levels can be higher, but purchase motivation and reading frequency might not be. Research also confirms that a primary reason for subscribers to cancel is that they no longer find the time to read every day. 

 *A second issue relates to the impact on sales as readers drift between subscription and single-copy purchases. A look at the detail - in Europe at least where newspapers are widely available - shows that as subscriber sales fall, single-copy sales rise at between a third and half the rate. Why? Because the subscriber continues to buy casually two or three times a week. Ironically, readership patterns do not necessarily change.

Newspapers have a unique relationship with their readers. As I’ve said in the past, this can only be enhanced by the increasingly interactive, hybrid interaction between readers and writers.

We need to stop thinking that our shallow relationship with subscribers is all that matters, and realize that value can be created by rewarding allegiance on every step of the loyalty ladder, by journalists and marketers alike.
 

Jim Chisholm advises many of the world’s leading media organizations on business strategy and growth. He can be contacted at jim.chisholm@futureofthenewspaper.com.